Mullis: Suffering from the madness

Spring Fever takes many forms, none more debilitating than that which affects college basketball fans. Its clinical name is March Madness.

My son suffers from The Madness.

I dread spring teacher conferences because of it. The news is never encouraging. Like this year, when I learned my son had received a detention for filling out an NCAA bracket during class.

Normally, my son doesn’t get detentions. But it’s March, and he’s not normal.

I blame college basketball’s kooky postseason methods.

Although college basketball teams play a regular season, winning will only get them so far. The ultimate champion isn’t determined by a playoff, but a tournament. Getting an invitation to the tournament is where the madness begins.

Sixty-eight teams will play, but only 32 do so by winning their conference. The other 36 receive bids from the “selection committee” based on … whatever selection committees talk about behind closed doors.

Rumors over those bids spread like a virus over the Internet and talk radio.

Once all the teams are in, the selection committee “seeds” them, which determines who plays whom to start the tournament. Then, on Selection Sunday, they reveal the almighty “bracket,” which is what landed my son in detention.

Fans can’t resist filling out these brackets. Some wager large sums of money on their prognosticating skills, even though the odds of filling out a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

Quintillion. That’s an insane number.

After all this hoopla, the teams actually play hoops.

And play.

And play.

And play.

Sixty-seven all-or-nothing games, all leading to the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, the Finalists, and, finally, the Champion.

These games are heavily televised – insanely televised if you count pregame shows, postgame shows, highlight shows, and the Selection Show. That’s three weeks of buzzers, shot clocks and rubber soles.

As my youngest put it, “March is the sound of squeaking.”

My son doesn’t miss a squeak, which might be my fault.

Seventeen years ago, when I was expecting my son, my husband received tickets to the Big Ten basketball tournament, which determined who would go to the NCAA tournament. Michigan State was in the running and we are MSU graduates.

I was six months pregnant. We drove to Chicago, walked several blocks to the arena, climbed several flights of stairs to our seats, and watched for several hours.

It wasn’t my soundest decision. And, every spring, as my son struggles to concentrate during school, I wonder if I exposed him to The Madness in utero.

Of course, it could be genetic. His father displays similar symptoms, greeting my son with game analysis before they congregate in front of the television.

Squeak, squeak.

This is why I confronted our son about his NCAA-related detention.

He explained it wasn’t a tournament bracket, as he had already filled out that bracket. This was about whose basketball mascot would win in a fight according to where they were seeded.

Before I could digest this new level of psychosis, his father asked who he picked, which dissolved to a discussion about who would win in a fight between a University of Hawaii Rainbow Warrior and a University of Miami Hurricane.

Yep. These are the questions my son is pondering the month before his college entrance exams.